Gino Odjick was the key player in the saga to retire Bure's jersey

Ex -Vancouver Canuck Gino Odjick with former coach Pat Quinn and mother and wife of Pavel Bure during his jersey retirement ceremony at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC, on November 2, 2013.Photo by
Staff Photographer

To understand the story of how Pavel Bure went from vilified, dissociated ex-Canuck to celebrated icon who received the organization's greatest honour, you have to travel back some 20 years and land in a hotel on East Hastings.

The Atrium Inn is where Gino Odjick lived, and socialized, back in the early 1990s. You could find him there on the regular, in the hotel bar and restaurant, and much of the time he was with Bure.

As Bure explained when asked to describe this long, close friendship with Odjick this week: "We were young. We were single. We had a lot of fun."

The pair would go on to forge a friendship so close that the Russian hall-of-famer wanted Odjick on the ice with him when he watched his jersey raised to the Rogers Arena heavens Saturday.

"When I played, if anyone went into Pavel's airspace, he was getting a beating," Odjick said. "In the last four years of my career, we didn't play together. But no one dared touch him, even still.

"I was on another team and if they touched him, they were going to play me sooner or later. And that's just the way it was."

The Atrium was owned by a rich local family in the early 1990s: the Aquilinis. Fransceco Aquilini was in his early 30s, and would frequent that same hotel bar. A Canucks fan, he got a kick out of knocking back drinks and shooting the breeze with players.

With Odjick, Aquilini developed a relationship which would become a key reason the Canucks made the call, in 2012, to hang No. 10 nearly two decades later.

In the excitement that followed the Aquilinis taking control of the Canucks in 2004, Odjick let Francesco know he was willing to offer him free advice, from player to owner, from friend to friend.

But Odjick had two priorities. One, he was dedicated to efforts to eradicate First Nations poverty, and wanted support.

And two, he wanted to see Bure's number retired.

"I was crazy enough to believe Pavel could get into the Hall of Fame and he could get his jersey retired," Odjick said. "People kept saying it would never happen.

"I kept asking and asking. He was very skeptical at first, and didn't think it could be done.

"I just kept at it." During the next eight years, Odjick was one of the most consistent and persistent voices trying to work Aquilini, convincing the owner it was time to move past the awkwardly toxic relationship the team had with its greatest player, and honour Bure the right way.

There were others involved, but Odjick was the only one who had a direct line and influence with the Russian superstar.

The do-or-give-up-the-ghost moment came when Bure was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Some viewed it as potentially humiliating if the team's only Hall of Famer didn't have his number retired.

Odjick had implored Francesco to make the trip to Toronto for a dinner leading up to Bure's induction. If the owner didn't, Odjick was ready to give up hope anything was going to happen. And so was Bure.

"I got him to that dinner," Odjick said. "This doesn't happen without Pat Quinn at the Hall of Fame. And it doesn't happen without Francesco Aquilini.

"We never quit." The details of that dinner were reported in The Province back in November 2012.

It was a historic, summit meeting in which Aquilini outlined his plan to honour the most electrifying player in Canucks history.

The owner's plan, of course, became the organization's plan.

It meant the team had to alter criteria the Canucks had set for retiring numbers. To determine whether a player was worthy of the team's greatest honour, it was supposed to be a combination of great skill on the ice with a devotion to community service.

Bure always shied from the attention, so he was never going to get marks for his community service.

That didn't seem so important any more, when the owner wanted that number up in the rafters.

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